American Christian nationalism, one would assume, would embrace all Christians but it has not for the last five hundred years. American Christian nationalism has always been White Christian nationalism. How can not be when for hundreds of years non-whites, particularly Blacks, were not even considered fully human? Citizenship and Christianity of Blacks were always in doubt.
With Blacks suffering the wrath of the American state until the late 1970s, a hundred years after the Civil War and 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, it is unsurprising that their relationship with the American state is different from White American's. The benevolence of the American state and reverence for American exceptionalism and militarism were contested ideas in the Black community. And Blacks found it difficult to accept that America has always been a "shining city on the hill" and the American military has always been a force of righteousness and freedom.
See below how Senator Warnock of Georgia, who is the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta since 2005, was criticized for his Christian beliefs and the social gospel, that do not conform to Christian nationalism and American exceptionalism. The Ebenezer Baptist Church has a long history of progressivism and the social gospel movement. Here Martin Luther King, Jr. and his father preached for more than 40 years. These are excerpts from What the Attacks on Raphael Warnock’s Faith Reveal about Christian Nationalism by Quardricos Driskell in Religion and Politics:
Ugly symbolism and dangerous rhetoric were on display during the Georgia Senate races as well. The campaign of Republican Senator David Perdue, Ossoff’s opponent, ran an attack ad that enlarged the Jewish candidate’s nose in what Ossoff said was the “oldest, most obvious, least original anti-Semitic trope in history.” Warnock’s opponent, Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, repeatedly attacked the pastor as radical because of his faith and social justice sermons. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) released an attack ad against Warnock featuring excerpts of black theologians and famed preachers: the late Rev. Dr. James Cone, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, and the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, ending with its editorial proclamation: “You can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps.” What was and is lacking in Republicans’ understanding of Warnock’s preaching is any sense of its historical imperatives and, particularly, any depth of understanding of the Black church and its preaching tradition, the social gospel movement, and Black liberation theology.
For too long, the Republican Party has claimed to be the party of the faithful, namely through its identification with the Religious Right. For decades, they have claimed the mantle of “Moral Majority.” Paul Weyrich, the late political activist and co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote in the 1970s, “The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition. When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Today, these Christians—mainly white evangelicals with a swath of Catholics and other Protestants—make up the backbone of support for Trump.
The GOP does not have a monopoly on religious voters or Christian values, though. They have tied their politics to a corrupted brand of white Christianity—as seen at the Capitol riot and the rally before it. Among the symbols there, perhaps none were so numerous as those of Christianity, including crosses, images of Jesus, and signs with biblical verses. The meld of the GOP and Trump and Christian nationalism seemed complete. When the mob violently stormed into the Senate chamber, one insurrectionist could be seen carrying the “Christian flag.” Outside, some protesters unfurled a massive banner. It read: “Jesus 2020.”...
These Trump supporters seem to say that it is not right to malign their Christianity or beliefs in this way, just as it was not right to ask any questions of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s conservative Catholic faith during her confirmation hearings. Yet, somehow it was fair game to attack Warnock for his faith, beliefs, and sermons without any theological context or understanding. How fascinating it is to see whose beliefs and interpretations are publicly dissected and criticized.
During Warnock’s campaign, a video of him preaching that “nobody can serve God and the military” turned into a rallying cry for some Republicans, who accused him of being anti-military. Loeffler, his opponent, said that Warnock “insulted our active service military members. He insulted our veterans. He insulted their families.” Meanwhile, other Republicans, including Senator Tom Cotton, demanded that Warnock drop out of the race. And yet, Scripture says “no man can serve two masters”—the biblical verse that Warnock was invoking to mean that a devotion to God must come first. This lack of understanding about the Black preaching tradition is willful and not a product of simple unawareness. It is necessary to protect a white evangelical worldview.
Source: What the Attacks on Raphael Warnock’s Faith Reveal about Christian Nationalism
The Black tradition of the social gospel equipped civil rights leaders with much of their movement’s intellectual underpinning. Essentially, to attack Warnock as “radical” is to attack, square-on, the legacy of King. Like Warnock, he believed that racism, sexism, militarism, poverty, and classism were deeply ingrained iniquities that long have threatened America’s democratic ideals. Whenever religious figures speak in the prophetic tradition that critiques American imperialism and exceptionalism, they are vilified as anti-American. These tropes are compounded and used more frequently against those situated in the Black church and African American preaching tradition. In 1967, King’s “Beyond Vietnam” address at Riverside Church crucially condemned America for its lack of empathy and financial resources for the poor and racially oppressed while calling for the end of America’s proliferation of the military-industrial complex. As pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist—where King, his father, and maternal grandfather were pastors—Warnock’s preaching proclaims the belief that Christianity is spiritual and political and grounded in justice for the oppressed. The attacks against Warnock are not only jabs at the Black prophetic preaching tradition but also digs at Black American Christian communities on the whole, who through the practiced preaching of biblical texts, like that of the Exodus story, insistently call America to be its better self.
Religious beliefs emerge from a much broader and more complex political-ideological context than our holy books, alone, can provide. For instance, the idea of climate crisis denial is often inextricably linked to belief in unfettered capitalism, justified by a kind of “prosperity theology,” the belief that material gain is a reward from God for personal virtue. No one should be surprised at the intersection of faith and public policy. Many presidents and politicians have used the symbols of Christianity to appeal to the American people. The famed sociologist Robert Bellah coined the term “civil religion,” the belief that semi-religious national symbols—often derived from the Abrahamic faiths—are used to unite the country during difficult times.
What happens to our civil religion now? Where there is hope, it will come from boundary-breaking leaders like Ossoff and Warnock, who herald a new day in Congress. These newly elected senators support issues like voting rights, inclusiveness, and access to healthcare, as well as taking care of people regardless of their background—a nod to the biblical value of opening hands to those in need.
The Republican Party’s current fusion with Christian nationalism is dangerous. The idea that America was founded as a Christian, mostly white nation—and that an authentic American must be Christian—erodes the very sanctity of any unifying “civil religion.” This reality was egregiously illustrated on January 6 by Trump’s incitement of violence from his Christian supporters on the National Mall. It was ignobly seen in his use of the Bible and a church as pretexts to forcibly remove peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square last June. Warnock’s sermons, like King’s sermonic critiques of America, are not distortions of the Bible like these events. Rather, they are prophetic commentaries on the power structure that supports the idea of Christian nationalism. And they are needed more than ever, from the pulpits of Georgia to the congressional chambers of Washington.
Jonathan Walton, dean of the Wake Forest University School of Divinity, explains in his Washington Post article that criticism of Warnock, and earlier of Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Obama's minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago, is based on "ignorance about the progressive Black church tradition." Their sermons may appear unpatriotic but in fact, they are deeply patriotic.
Preachers such as Warnock may strike the comfortable as offensive, but their critiques aren’t unpatriotic screeds. Rather, they proclaim a deep love for, and thus a deep disappointment in, a country that too often fails to affirm the self-evident truth in our nation’s creed, that all people are created equal and endowed by God “with certain unalienable Rights.”
The mischaracterization isn’t new. Wright, President Barack Obama’s former pastor, was pilloried during the 2008 presidential election for his 2003 sermon, “Confusing God and government” despite decades as a respected clergyman and having served honorably in the Marine Corps. Wright was accused of preaching “anti-white and anti-American rhetoric” for saying “God damn America” in a sermon that addressed a list of this nation’s sins, including Native American genocide, slavery and unjust wars. Go back a bit further in history and Martin Luther King Jr. — himself once a pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church — was accused of being “the most notorious liar in the country” by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The attacks misconstrue African American progressive and prophetic religious protest. Informed by the evangelical strand of the social gospel, this tradition places an overwhelming moral emphasis on society’s most vulnerable and oppressed. It demands that Christians bear witness and ameliorate the suffering of others, as set forth in the parable in Matthew 25 where Jesus likens our treatment of God with how we treat those without food and shelter, or those who are sick and imprisoned: “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says of those who enter God’s kingdom, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Indeed, in his December debate with Loeffler, Warnock said: “I’m a Matthew 25 Christian.”
Bearing witness in this way involves uncomfortable truth-telling directed toward those in power. In 2008 at the National Press Club, Wright explained that his aim was to hold his government accountable, not to tear it down: “God doesn’t bless everything. God condemns some things … God damns some practices and there’s no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done. That doesn't make me not like America or unpatriotic.” Similarly, in his 1967 address, “Beyond Vietnam,” King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He didn’t mean America could do no right. But it is necessary to acknowledge where America is wrong toward ultimately transforming “the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
Such a spiritual orientation demands moral courage and candor from clergy. Some call it speaking truth to power and others call it parrhesia — candid, fearless speech that challenges the status quo. Historians and literary scholars alike refer to this rhetorical tradition in America as a jeremiad, based on the laments of the biblical Hebrew prophet Jeremiah against unjust practices in ancient Israel, for it’s the Hebrew prophets who provide the moral vocabulary and vivid imagery for preachers such as Warnock who are a part of this tradition.
The Bible is replete with the scathing indictments of those who wept over oppression. Recall Jeremiah: “Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labor” (Jeremiah 22:13); and Amos, decrying those who “trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed” (Amos 2:7). The biblical prophets enunciated their divine call to be voices of the voiceless and defenders of the defenseless. They did not try to soothe or assuage listeners with euphemistic phrases. Their rhetoric was often blunt, unyielding and contentious.
This is the beauty and burden of this tradition. Those informed by it — including abolitionists David Walker and Sojourner Truth, and contemporary voices such as the Rev. Otis Moss III of Chicago and the Rev. Leslie D. Callahan of Philadelphia — hold that clergy cannot convey faithfully the spirit of God’s concern for the most vulnerable without being honest about the ways our society, including public policy, is complicit in their suffering. To answer God’s call is not merely to comfort the afflicted. It is also to afflict the comfortable. To not do so would be derelict of Christian duty for those who embrace this progressive and prophetic spiritual stance.
That some may find this form of Christian witness troubling makes sense, considering that many preachers in America specialize in positive affirmations and promises of personal and national prosperity. It can be easier to find comfort in the conciliatory tones and feel-good phrases that can be found in their churches on Sunday mornings. Some see those who appease and affirm the cultural markers of power as more hopeful than clergy who channel the seeming doom and gloom of the jeremiad. But in the prophetic tradition, hope comes from our ability to confront the worst of ourselves as a nation, progressing toward our better selves, not from sentimentality or naive optimism.
When Warnock inveighs against politicians who “pick the pockets of the poor” to “line the pockets of the ultrarich,” that doesn’t make him anti-capitalist. He’s making the charge that certain policies and policymakers willfully ignore the concerns of the most defenseless among us and insisting that our nation can do better. Saying “nobody can serve God and the military” at the same time isn’t a shot at the faith of our troops. It’s a reminder to the faithful of the teaching in Zechariah 4:6 that true victory, according to God, comes “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit” — that ultimate hope is grounded in love and justice, not weapons of warfare.
These appeals to love and justice have animated progressive Christians to fight to protect rights and expand opportunities for the socially marginalized. This has been true during every epoch of this nation: Abolishing slavery, women securing the vote, defending labor rights and dismantling segregation are just a few examples. In this tradition, clergy must call out the folly of power, industrial efficiency or wealth predicated on the unjust treatment of any segment of society. Whether the ill is human trafficking or the warehousing of the vulnerable by lucrative privatized prisons, “dishonest money dwindles away” (Proverbs 13:11).
It shouldn’t surprise that Black churches, born as institutional responses to Black oppression, have produced some of this nation’s most powerful voices, who have helped emancipate American democracy. At an 1852 Independence Day commemoration, Frederick Douglass addressed the gathering and asked: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” He answered his own question by saying that to the enslaved, “your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity.” That Douglass gave speeches throughout the United States and Europe castigating what he called slaveholding Christianity made him a target for White indignation and claims of anti-Americanism. Yet today he is universally lauded as a patriot.
It may be convenient for Warnock’s adversaries to attack him for lacking an uncritical embrace of American exceptionalism and unqualified veneration of her customs. It may be useful to try to tarnish a pretty clear political asset in the South: being a minister. But when Warnock’s opponents claim he’s un-American, they’re not just presenting an uninformed view of his preaching, they’re negating the true gift of Warnock’s tradition: loving America enough to be honest about its flaws while calling for America to aspire to its highest, most noble ideals.
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